


Heaven-Handling

by paperiuni



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Families of Choice, Friendship/Love, Gen, M/M, Qunari, Reunions, Trespasser DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 20:05:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5305061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When infiltrating a Qunari outpost, the Inquisitor's party find more than they bargained for--and Bull finds his exile did not hew him loose from quite <i>all</i> he knew.</p><p>(Set during the Trespasser DLC.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heaven-Handling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenityfails](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/gifts).



> **Contains spoilers for the Trespasser DLC.**
> 
> For Katie, who quite unknowingly gave me _the best prompt_ in the circumstances. I hope you enjoy this, late as it is!
> 
> Thanks to Kris for brainstorming and Riss for booting this past the halfway point. ♥

The night outside the fort smells riotously of home.

The knowledge snaps at Bull's heels as their party of four work their way through the Darvaarad outpost in spells of stealth and bursts of violence. Both moons are sickles of ivory in the star-spread darkness. If he had the time to glance at the constellations, they'd be as he learned them three decades ago, when Tama would take her whole flock of children to the hills outside Qunandar on cloudless summer nights.

The tang of shepherd's mint winds into his nose in the researcher's workroom where they hide until a group of karashok warriors turn a corner and vanish down a hallway. Out on a parapet, whiteflower vines ramble across the stonework, too fragile for any intruder to climb, too fragrant--and useful--for the outpost workers to cut as a weed. The mountainside behind the fortress is studded with cypresses. The dew-damp trees soak the night air with resin and memory.

As soon as the word, _Darvaarad_ , was spoken, Bull knew. The Ben-Hassrath would never risk building such a site outside Qunari lands. When he stepped out of the eluvian after the Inquisitor, it still took him a deep breath or two to steady himself. Any longer, and the worry in Dorian's sideward glance would've blossomed into a question.

They're in Par Vollen.

He took the fact and slotted it in place in his mind. Tidy little boxes, each holding a truth or a trick, shut fast against spilling. He cracks open the ones that may help. The Viddasala's purpose would seldom intersect with a Hissrad's, but the Qunari build everything with utility in mind. Even at first glance, he can guess how the outpost is laid out. He can steel himself and mutter to Sera and Dorian to watch out for the skirmishers and their poison-coated blades. Lavellan gives a single nod when he tells her to mind her barriers, because the raw, rushing power of the saarebas packs a harder punch than the spells of southern mages.

His connections to the Qun were cut years ago. He may be ignorant of this plot, but he knows the people who raised him. Whatever morsels he can dig up to arm his friends now, he will damn well use.

He was taught to fight with every weapon at his disposal.

The striped, ruddy granite of the barracks floor might've come from the great quarries north of Qunandar. Sera puts a silent arrow through the back of a sentry's neck. His blood sluices along the mortared seams of the floor stones. Bull crosses the sluggish rill of red and takes care not to step in it.

*

The Viddasala speaks harshly from her balcony, and the karataam in the vestibule below stir to her command. Her voice holds fear as well as authority. Bull counts at least ten soldiers as he moves to the stairway; it's too broad for one man to hold but the best bottleneck he can see at a glance. Behind him, his three friends brace themselves.

Her timbre shifts. Still, she can never project anything but certainty, and so certainty rings in her next order. "Hissrad. Now, please. _Vinek kathas._ "

Lavellan has barely five phrases of Qunlat, Sera not even that. It's Dorian who gasps on Bull's left, ever covering his blind side, as the Viddasala's words plummet into his ears. Dorian, who hears and understands her imperious demand. Bull averts his eye, because he can spare no time for reassurance, and looking at Dorian would undo him as surely as he knows his answer to her.

He sets his jaw and levels a dagger stare at her. "Not a chance, ma'am."

Even with the distance in between, he sees her expression crumple with disdain. She held out some final dreg of redemption, hoping to bait him. With clarity, with purpose.

With home.

Then--a timely thing--the first karashok already pounds up the steps. Bull finishes his reply by hewing the soldier's sword arm from his body, as Dorian sheets the stairway with glass-slick ice and trips the next two troopers neatly onto their faces.

The thud of the balcony door behind the Viddasala is lost in the din of the fray. Dorian's ice trick diverts their opponents to the far end of the vestibule, where another, narrow set of stairs snakes up to the door through which their party entered. Even so, the vestibule makes for a confined arena. Some of the soldiers below carry light javelins tipped with steel; Bull bears Lavellan forcefully to the floor in mid-spell when the first one is lobbed at her over the railing.

Every one of the karataam will die for the Viddasala. Their blood will buy her time to fulfill her mission. A saarebas's fire melts the hampering ice, and then they are beset from both sides. Her bow all but useless, Sera flings a flask over herself and draws her daggers. Her white-wreathed form darts up against one of the nimble, prowling skirmishers with uncanny speed. Bull sets himself at Dorian's back to give him what time he can to recover in between castings: flame and thunder and decay in a rapid, ragged succession, while Lavellan wields her protective magics to keep them all on their feet.

Sera flows daringly down the stairs towards the lone remaining enemy mage. Glass shatters against the floor just behind Bull, but snarled Tevene and a flare of heat tell him that Dorian had time to swallow the contents of the vial before it slipped his grasp. Bull spins into the opening as a charging karashok recoils from Dorian, his leathers smoking, his free hand clutched against his face. He straightens right into the downswing of Bull's axe.

Yanking his weapon free from the soldier's crushed torso, Bull feels the sudden cold sweep of Lavellan flickering forward through the Fade. She trails after Sera; an instant later the whip-crack of her lightning spell echoes across the walls.

No other noise takes its place.

Bull braces against the railing and lets himself wind to a halt. A score of hurts make themselves known across his body: a scratched forearm, a bruised thigh, a throb in his shoulder from the impact with the wall when a force spell bashed him back. He scrubs blood from his cheek--not his own.

Unbeckoned, another hand reaches for his face. He jolts, every sense strung taut, but the sight of Dorian leaning up to him eases him down. The smell of lyrium wafts from him, familiar and unsettling, and the sharp light in his eyes signals the same alertness Bull clings to. They're not safe yet. Not by a long shot.

"Are you all right?" Dorian's voice mellows into a murmur. The supple palm of his studded glove tracks over Bull's jaw. The gesture and timbre combine to bar Bull from a wry reply.

He's had Dorian back for mere days after months of separation. In those days came the irrefutable confirmation that Dorian must leave again, and now this. The mess with the eluvians and the Viddasala's agents. The trapped dragon just ahead. The patchy fact that Solas, thought long vanished, is afoot and in danger. Lavellan takes old friends very seriously, which leaves the rest of them little choice but follow her wherever this twisty reunion leads them.

Dorian, however, is an immediate truth. Bull rests his temple against Dorian's upturned brow. "Never better," he says, and adds, a hushed reminder, " _kadan_."

The question was not if he was hurt. It's not the question he answers. They'll talk later, back in Halamshiral; ferret away a few hours before duty reaffirms its grip on them both.

"I'm glad to hear it, _amatus_." Dorian sighs, relief trickling into the sound. Lavellan and Sera are both astute in their way, but neither knows Bull quite like Dorian does. There was a heft to the Viddasala's demand, one that he can't let bow him now.

He drops an arm around Dorian and, if only until they catch their breath, takes refuge in his nearness.

The Qun would see such attachment to a single person as unforgivably selfish. Each Qunari is a loop in a weave, a knot in a net, connecting to many others to form a harmonious whole. To value only one above the rest would interfere with the ties to the greater society.

Yet, Dorian is what steadies him in the chaos, an anchor cast into unquiet waters.

He jerks back to the present at Lavellan's voice. She pitches it to carry up from the lower part of the room. "Are you two there? Sera is hurt."

"Crap." Concern shoots through Bull. Dorian steps back to fumble at his waning supply of elfroot potions, and they hurry down the wider stairway. Dropped weapons and slumped bodies litter the floor, water from thawing spell ice pooling at the bottom of the stairs. Someone is moaning feebly by the wall, but Bull pinions his eye on their two companions.

Lavellan has called a spell wisp to cast back the twilight. Its glow bares the puncture wound in Sera's abdomen, the cruel punch of an ice spike through her leathers. Her own hands clench over the injury, wet and scarlet, trembling with the strain.

"Shite, that stings." Pain muddles Sera's voice. "Is it bad? Don't even tell me, has to be bad."

"It is," Lavellan says. Dorian pushes a wad of bandage linen into her hands, for forming a crude compress for the bleeding. Going on one knee, he tilts Sera's head to dribble some of the elfroot mixture into her mouth.

The vestibule shivers with a resounding roar from the enclosed courtyard beyond. Right, the blighted dragon. It can't be without guards, which means that sooner rather than later some of those guards will wise up to the silence in the vestibule.

"Can you fix her, boss?" No sense beating around the bush. Lavellan looks wan from the press of the recent fight, but she's the only one with healing magic. Apparently Dorian's necromantic knack clashes with the sort of spells that sustain life.

"Yes, with some time and lyrium. I must." 

"Can't--can't do that here," Sera argues reedily. Her eyes clench into crinkles. "Nnngh. Find a bolthole. You know one, right?"

"Shh." Dorian coaxes another gulp of potion into her. It'll suppress the pain, but judging by the bleeding, the wound goes deep. The gut is a chancy place to get stabbed.

"I'll find one," Bull tells Sera. Fresh blood wells from her stomach as he lifts her, one broad hand splayed under her back; Lavellan hastens to bind her scarf around Sera's middle as a temporary torque.

"Good." Sera's head lolls back. Cradled in his arms, she barely burdens him, but Bull takes her weight as a touchstone. He chose to stand with her: her and Lavellan and Dorian. He'll see her safe through this.

*

As Sera slips into a limp stupour of pain, Bull concludes that he's less certain of where to find shelter than he asserted to her. She's still losing blood, although the tight dressing slows the rate.

"This is the barracks again," Dorian says low from the front. "We passed that crooked lantern sconce before."

"Such a crime against decoration." Bull huffs, a tad amused despite himself. "The things you notice."

"Yes, well." Dorian halts as they draw up to a shut door. "Someone taught me the worth of observing my surroundings."

As if Bull needs another intimation of how closely he's let his life knit to this man. He bites back both lament and warmth and shoves stark sense in their place. Through the barracks there must be the mess hall, which in turn will be by the kitchen. At this hour of night, the kitchen should be empty, and it'll have an entrance to the cellar or at least a set of storerooms.

It might be a dead end. It'll also be a more covert and defensible position than skulking through the corridors. Bull indicates the door with a cock of his head; Lavellan presses her ear to it to listen for occupants.

They sidle through the barracks. They serve as their own diversion: most soldiers in the fort are out hunting for the intruders, not snoring in their cots. Thankfully they came geared for stealth, so Bull's bracer is muffled with cloth, their armour light and their colours muted. The mess appears on their right, but a side passage the kitchen workers must use allows them to bypass the broad, open room. Lavellan eases the kitchen door shut by careful inches.

In the purple bloom of Dorian's spell wisp, the kitchen looks near surreal, mundane details in conjured light. Covered crocks on the long work tables let the aroma of rising dough into the ember-warmed air. Bull slants his head so as not to hit his horns on a rack full of dangling pots and pans.

"Back there. Through the door." He more mouths the words. Sera's too still in his hold.

Past sealed barrels of mild ale and sacks of wheat, millet and rice, under rows of herbs hung from the ceiling beams, they venture into the cool of the storeroom. Worry is brightest in his mind, hemmed by a towing, tugging sense of comfort.

In the children's compound, the kids were involved in every kind of work as soon as their strength and maturity were up to the task. Whatever path was chosen for them later, they all learned the skills of everyday life together.

The scent of the bread dough, with ground sunroot leaf and sweet nuts, could be drifting from the hot, homely kitchen of the compound. The floor is strewn with quillreed, a few feathery husks caught in the soot-rubbed buckles of Dorian's boots. At the far end, the storeroom bends at a right angle to continue behind a half-wall covered in shelves.

He can pick a dozen better moments for reliving old memories. Bull shakes himself, then stops as Sera makes a plaintive protest at the jostling.

Both Dorian and Lavellan hitch closer towards him. The spell wisp shrinks to a point no brighter than a flickering coal.

The storeroom is breathlessly quiet, but Bull scents the smoke of a snuffed wick. It comes from the smaller space in the back. The extinguished candle must've been masked by their own light. Dorian passes his staff to Lavellan and crooks the fingers of his free hand. His magic rises languid and listless, like a stroking hand over the eyes. A sleep spell in the making; Bull can no longer remember how and when he learned to piece together the cues.

Someone moves into the doorway, a skittish shadow in the near black. Little as he minded Sera shooting a sentry, Bull's briefly glad that Dorian chose a gentler enchantment. It's probably a cook or a kitchen-hand, taking stock or pilfering fruit. No one with military discipline, to so expose herself.

The wisp flares so Dorian can aim, a blink of illumination, and in that blink Bull sees the woman on the threshold. Stooped and startled, she curls away from Dorian, her hands up to shield her face. A bound plenty of small braids whip with her movement, but it is spotting the gentle backswept crescents of her horns that drags the command from Bull's throat.

"Dorian, stop!"

And Dorian, who trusts Bull without question, lowers his hand. Lavellan's gaze swings up at Bull's face. Ignoring her, for once in his life, he steps forward.

The woman erects herself, her spine stiff and her fingers fisted in her loose, undyed skirts. A knife hangs from her belt but she makes no motion to draw it; a short, utilitarian blade. The light paints shadow into the crow's feet around her eyes and to the corners of her chapped mouth.

She's so old now, he understands. Her horns are wound with the red knots of the elders in honour of her years. Her eyes slit with dawning scrutiny as they move from Dorian--the obvious menace, the bas saarebas with the fey light at his shoulder--and over to Bull.

He should've let Dorian cast the spell. Blood is seeping through Sera's bandage, damp on his ribs.

"Tama." He puts into the name the unthinkable recognition beating in his skull.

Her mouth pursed, she looks at his face, as if she had all the time in the world for it. "I know you," she says, in her rolling Qunlat.

She does. As he knows her. If words even exist that he could speak, they elude him.

"Bull." Dorian's voice. A hand on his arm. Both seem to pierce the bubble of silence around him. The moment sieves back into his awareness. "Bull, Sera can't wait. Give her to me."

"There's a bar on the door." Wood claps on wood as Lavellan sets the two staves, her own and Dorian's, to lean against a shelf. "I suppose this will do for a hiding place."

Feeling thunderstruck, Bull loosens his grip so Dorian can pull the unmoving bundle of elf from his arms. The bar shaves into place with a final dull snap, then Lavellan crosses the room again to crouch down beside Sera, as Dorian lays her on the floor. The Inquisitor's dark-shining eyes track the aged qunari woman--Tama, that is his Tama--but she seems to have ceded the problem to Bull.

His thoughts have torn like a sack of grain, spilling wildly from the cart. His friends move around him, maybe with the implicit confidence that he'll handle this surprise, maybe because he's standing there slack-jawed while Sera keeps bleeding.

"Yeah." He touches the dim smear of blood on his side. The word came out in Common. He starts again, in his native tongue. "Yeah. You know me."

The years have thinned her, melted the roundness of her hips and the full curves of her cheeks. Her gaze gleams with vital interest through the calm he recalls so well. It might almost be she's decided that four uninvited guests in the pantry are just the thing to spice up her night.

"I gave you to the Ben-Hassrath," she says then. "You aren't with them now."

His breath punches out of him with force that'd have got him a wallop from his ancient spy instructor. He can't stem the reaction. If he were what she sent him out to become, he'd never have stopped Dorian. The spell would've rendered her harmless, and they could've carried on the job.

His eye turned towards a wall, he nods, angled and awkward. "With the Inquisition. Still."

"I was told so." How much of her calm is truly her, and how much a mask? With a brief sick clarity he realises that he could break her with his bare hands. That may be what she expects, of her charge who's come home as a nighttime intruder. As a Tal-Vashoth.

"They won't hurt you." Automatically he stands so that he blocks her view of Lavellan, whose hands shimmer with pulses of healing energy. On top of all else, he's in the company of two mages. The second of them picks up his staff and sets himself to watch the barred door.

Dorian. For a burning instant Bull just wants his closeness, his silence, his support. No chance of that now.

"And will you?" She folds her bare arms. A pale, snaking scar bisects the back of her right hand.

"Will I what?"

"Hurt me," she says, matter-of-fact.

The snipped syllables wrench at something in his chest. He teeters back a step, without meaning to, and shakes his head violently in lieu of the denial twitching in his throat. "Tama. I..."

"I am not that anymore." She echoes his gesture, more softly, her white braids swishing. "I left the Tamassran, and became Taarbas. There's much work here for an archivist."

A dark smudge on the pad of her thumb, from licking it and leafing through sheets of vellum. A callus on the second joint of the forefinger, from holding a quill or a reed pen. His eye skims her figure, noting details as he wonders at this deliberate crack in her composure.

Dorian spits and hisses with consternation at the concept of fate, and Bull well understands why. But his first teacher and caretaker, the woman whose example he aspired to follow, stands in the doorway before him. They're in the middle of an outpost of enemies who were once his own people. It hasn't been an hour since he affirmed his side in this fight, and now here she is.

Fate or fortune, it disarms him utterly.

She fists the hand he was eyeing, as if to conceal her change of function. A tamassran is a prestigious role, even in a society that claims to put equal importance on all its members. She was a good one, the best he could've asked for. A child's innocent assessment. He courts forty now, and she must be sixty at least.

From a priest to a clerk is an unfathomable plummet. Why was she told of his exile?

"Was that my fault?" he mutters. She gave him to the Ben-Hassrath, but he failed them in the end.

Astonishment wrests through her facade, no matter that Qunari tend to set their faces in the presence of outsiders. In truth, he can look at little but her. He could as soon grab the sun from the sky as go back to Par Vollen; he'd accepted all aspects of that fact.

"Oh." Her hand unfurls again. "No, no. You are not to blame. You were well suited for the path I put you on. Too well, it might be."

The years have not dimmed her wits. She sways and steadies through the same surprise that rakes at him: neither did she think she'd ever see him again.

And he must go down another path, defend others that he loves, complete a task that puts him athwart of her.

"Are you saying that to comfort me?" It's a wavering lurch for a dry timbre. "I haven't been a kid in thirty years. I can take the truth."

A tiny snick from the side marks Lavellan uncorking a lyrium vial, her other hand gripping the spell she must sustain. Sera looks pale as chalk in its cloudy glow, but her chest rises and falls with whistling breaths. Dorian is a silhouette next to a support column, turned towards the door.

"This is the Inquisitor." _Bas sataareth_ , she says, the Qunlat word coined specifically to describe the woman who could seal the rifts. Are there rifts in Par Vollen?

"Lavellan," Bull agrees and corrects in the same breath. He uses her first name at times in private, but mostly, she's the boss, and that suffices.

Tama--maybe she'd forgive his inability to call her anything else--gestures at the others then. Fuck, what a moment to make introductions. He humours her because she's asking, and a real question is better than the hundred that are still waiting to become.

"She's Sera," he says, pointing so the others grasp why he speaks their names, "and Dorian. My friends."

Dorian is braced to listen, and so his name coupled with the sound of _kadan_ \--friend, brother, beloved, any and all--makes him look, a quick twist of his head towards Bull.

Bull decides. At his coaxing sign, Dorian steps closer. Bull doesn't have to ask to know that he's warded the door, which lets him slacken his watch for a moment. Tama trails him with her eyes, dark as wrought iron.

Once or twice, late at night, Dorian joked bitterly about taking Bull to Qarinus to meet his parents. _It'd be worth it for the look on my father's face. Save for the part where I'd be exiled for the insult, and you perhaps killed in imaginative ways. But, if we could secure our exit, it'd be a thought._ Now his father is dead by an assassin's hand. They are on the cloistered island of the Qunari, and the closest person Bull has to a parent is looking Dorian up and down.

" _Shanedan_ ," Dorian says, unprompted, pulling the _e_ too long like he always does. " _Maraas shokra._ "

Shit, Bull could--kiss him, berate him, he doesn't even know. His accent falters, Tevene turning his vowels liquid and his sibilants gritty, but the polite greeting comes across.

Curiosity swashes under Tama's collected countenance. "Your friend is from Tevinter."

By his example, she says, _kadan_ , and the most mistimed chortle of laughter slips from Bull's teeth at Dorian hastily fixing his own expression. "I am," Dorian puts in, still in Qunlat.

" _Salvē_." She nods head head, slantwise. Bull wonders whether she's ever in her life greeted a Tevinter so. "I know your southern Common." Her accent is probably worse than Dorian's. "If we are to speak."

"I thought you might wish to speak to him." Under the courtesy, Dorian's manner whispers concern, directed at Bull. He doesn't think her a threat, secure in Bull's estimation of the matter. "If... While there is a chance."

It's as if the entire room held its breath. They all move like actors through some painstaking pantomime, except for Lavellan, sunken in her healing, inhaling and exhaling in time with Sera's hissing drags for air.

"Yeah." Bull switches back to Qunlat. Dorian's words drive home the brevity of this moment. Bull leans in; Tama is taller than Dorian, but not by much. He'd only just grown taller than her when he left her, at twelve, to take his place in the world. "The dragon. The gaatlok. We have to put an end to it."

"The gaatlok?" Her puzzlement must be real. "We study the mirror paths here, for the Viddasala."

That'd be such a slip, if she hadn't rightly gauged that the only way they could've entered is through an eluvian.

"That why you're here? To catalogue what the kith bring back?" A note that Dorian found in the gatehouse log spoke of some kind of relic retrievals.

"That is my work as Taarbas." 

Sift and separate, divide and control; this is how the Ben-Hassrath operate. She has no inkling of why they hold the dragon in the courtyard, nor will she ask. It isn't part of her function.

Chance, then, of the most momentous kind. The Darvaarad needed an archivist, and someone in Qunandar sent them an aging woman whose pen hand remains sure and her eyes and mind keen.

Bull goes over to a lidded crate of fruit and sits down. She veers, still on the threshold, to face him again, while Dorian shuffles back a discreet three steps.

"I never thought I'd see you again," Bull says at length. The confession wrecks the last of his caution.

"Most imekari don't." She saw him off as a stripling, clear-eyed youth, and he's returned a man grown and scarred. Her smile has not changed.

"Come on," he dares to goad, gently, gently. "We all knew who those people were that came in through the kitchen at sunset. You always got out the good tea for them. Talked to them a while."

She wets her lip. Only now he sees that she has a horn lantern on the floor beside her, and bread and fruit wrapped in a cloth. No well-taught Qunari would take more than her share, but a diligent scribe might work past the communal evening meal to finish a task.

"I did wonder if you might come knocking, one day. But they sent you to Seheron." Her simple slippers rustling the reeds, she comes over to his crate. "That is a long way from Qunandar."

"Too long," he breathes. "I went away farther than that."

When she lays a hand on his arm, he makes no effort to stop his deep, helpless sigh. Her strong, fine fingers are entirely covered by his leather gauntlet, and their grip is firm.

"One can hammer a nail or weave a sandal and send it to be used," she says. "That is not true of children. You left my hands and I could only hope I'd steered you right. I had to let you go, but you never stop becoming."

Bull--that's who he is, who he chose to become--sits unspeaking under her words for a long time. It feels long, anyway, in the changeless light of Dorian's spell wisp. He listens to Sera's first clean, easy breath rise from her lungs.

"I would've come." He looks up at Tama. In plain terms, he's the enemy, and she made no motion to run or to rouse any alarm. Of course, Dorian could've brought her short with a sleep spell in three paces. "I... took a couple wrong turns, but many more right ones. So you guided me pretty well."

"You've kept your cleverness."

"Never could pull the same trick on you more than once. I had to keep picking up new ones."

The wrinkles by her eyes deepen with held amusement. "I named you an explorer, and they named you a spy. Which was right, in the end?" It's only half a question.

He's been named many things, in the last years. _Chief_ , _ser_ , captain. Exile, traitor, outcast. Friend, confidant, companion. _Amatus_ \--beloved, in uncertain tones that yearn to wrap fast around the word.

"I'm the Iron Bull, mostly, these days. 'Bull' to my friends. It's faster."

"That is what he called you." She glances at Dorian, who's crouched beside Sera, murmuring to her as Lavellan puts the finishing touches on the healing. She can't skimp on it; once they move, Sera must move at their speed.

"He is..." What has she guessed? What can she guess, given the barriers of culture and language, from this one pressed exchange? "They're good people. They're not of the Qun, but they're mine."

She watches by his side as Lavellan finally releases the spell. The Inquisitor totters, but Dorian's there, handing her water and a fistful of his prized soft apricots, to curtail the dizzying drop that swoops in on the tail of such a lengthy casting. On the floor, Sera groans out a shaky string of "Piss, arse, shite, stupid, stupid, _stupid_ ", and Bull has to stifle a laugh.

"I see that," Tama says close by his shoulder. "Is it very different, in the south?"

"Is what different?"

"Life," she clarifies, humming in thought. "This is like you asking if you could count every fruit in the orange trees."

"You said no," Bull points out, and the memory brings back the rainy scent of a winter night in Par Vollen, the wet dirt between his toes, and the fever that felled him for a week at the end of that nocturnal caper. "I got to three thousand and seventy eight."

She laughs, a rasping, wonderful sound.

"Day to day, it's pretty much the same. Still full of people trying to get by. Messier, in some ways." The question is too vast for the few minutes that he can delay. As soon as Sera finishes chewing the other half of Dorian's apricots and Lavellan musters her wits, they have to be off.

"It isn't as straightforward here as you may remember," Tama says, in the same tone she used when she explained to him the idea of war, or the danger of the saarebas, or why he shouldn't weep for the girl sleeping on the mat next to his when she died of the spring sickness one year.

"You're here, not in Qunandar."

"I am, and there is a reason for it." She squeezes at his arm, her hand such an unconscious comfort he almost forgot its weight on him. "You should go now."

The truth of that sinks into him. Maybe they all sidestepped the relentless flow of time for a moment, for as long as it took for two paths to merge that never should have.

Getting to his feet, he checks each of his three companions. Lavellan mops up the blood from the floor with a splash of water and her already ruined scarf. Even though Sera looks a fright, under her spattered leathers she's hale and resolute. By the door, Dorian dispels his warding glyphs, to undo all evidence that they ever were here.

All evidence but the memory of one woman.

Bull turns back to her. She's gone from raising children to listing and studying scraps of knowledge. You clean an ancient blade or cache a leaf of parchment, and they are what they are.

He couldn't ask, but when she winds her arms around him, he holds her close and doesn't count the time. She's wiry and warm. The familiar smell of cloves wreathes her braids, bound and oiled to keep them tidy.

"Go back through the kitchen," she says, in her rusty but precise Common. "Take the south door and go up to the parapet. That will take you to the courtyard of the _ataashi_."

Sera frowns, but Bull suspects from the lack of a spate of comments that Dorian filled her in. Grabbing her staff, Lavellan nods, at Bull and at Tama. Dorian smiles out of the corner of his mouth, and says, with a courtly dip of a bow, " _Panahedan._ I do regret we had no time for further conversation."

She acknowledges that with a nod in return, and then, irrevocably, they're ready.

"Go on, my truth-seeker, though I can never again call you small." Bull bows his head as she speaks, either tears or a grin clenching his throat. "If I knew who to thank, I would."

"Thank yourself," he says thickly. "You gave me the best chance I had. Even when I made a mess of it."

"If we are to hear Koslun, he does point out there's no chaos in the world, only complexity." He'll be damned, but there is a twinkle in her iron-hued eyes. "I see nothing about you that isn't complex, but you've found your way."

He releases her hand and knows he'll never hold it again. "Live well."

"And you," she says. "Live. Become."

*

It is much later, after the dragon and the Viddasala's giant saarebas, after the Inquisitor stumbles back from the last eluvian cradling her amputated arm, after Bull carries her to a frantic Josephine and a furious Cullen and all is bedlam, until Vivienne cuts through the demands and pleas for what happened and whisks Lavellan into her chambers to be examined.

The terrace with the observation spyglasses is vacant in the approaching dawn; the land rolls down towards the verdant river valley beyond the railing. Bull hasn't slept all night. He shed his armour and three quarters of his weapons and stole bread, ham and a skin of wine from the kitchen at the Gilded Horn. Most of the food sits untouched on the bench beside him.

"I keep telling you not to eat the ham." Dorian's changed out of his sensible leathers and into a less gaudy version of his ambassadorial attire. "It tastes like despair."

"That's the last thing we need," Bull agrees. "You bring anything else?"

Dorian sits, rummages at his belt pouch, and reaches across Bull to plant half a dozen sun-dried apricots onto the cloth. "The rest were devoured in service to our cause."

The apricot's just the right amount of chewy, so Bull focuses on that for a while. The sun crests the horizon in a stripe of molten light. "We still got one?"

"I suspect we'll know when Vivienne deems Lavellan well enough to tell us." Dorian pauses. "But... you do not mean that. Not the Inquisition's cause."

"Meant that, too," Bull says, but Dorian has the right of it. "Ask you a favour?"

"It depends." Dorian stretches out his spine, hands pushed high, and then inclines casually against Bull. "I may demand my dues with interest."

"Let me sleep before we have that talk."

"Oh." That encompasses much, that small sound. Dorian's covert lean becomes a full-body slump into his side. "All right. As repayment, perhaps you can allay my curiosity on a point of language?"

This might be going a number of places. At least Dorian brought fruit and early morning cuddles, such as they are, to sweeten the inquiry. "Go ahead."

"When we were..." They haven't broached the previous night from any angle. It might as well be this one. "Back in the Qunari fort. When you spoke to her, you kept using that word. _Kadan_." There Dorian's pronunciation is flawless. "Did you truly tell her..."

It isn't the most diplomatic angle, but Bull can't begrudge Dorian his curiosity. He drapes his arm properly around Dorian, who bends his knees over Bull's thigh, trusting that not too many prying eyes are about this early. "It doesn't matter to her, Dorian. Or, it matters, but not in the way you wonder."

They seem to have a loop of comfort between them these days: when one wavers, the other tends to know to step in. Dorian may have come both to seek ease and to offer it, though Bull isn't certain he needs it. Is there a word for the past creeping up to the present, to open a door that was supposedly shut forever? How would he explain how he is?

In the final tally, he's glad. Weary and worn, but content.

"Do tell, then."

"She knows you're someone I trust," Bull says, and drinks in Dorian's quiet, calmed sigh. "Someone that looks after me."

"Oh, _amatus_ ," Dorian mutters, soft and sure. "Whenever I may."

That, at least, Bull can take with him into the days to come. That in spite of distance, in spite of time, there are hands that will reach out for his, doors that will open for him, and places where love lingers.

_end_

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Carrion Comfort" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.


End file.
